“Her name is Maraud. She’s been through a lot. And she’s an allosaurus. T. rexes have two fingers; she has three. See?”
“Right,” I said, because I was pretty sure he’d explained this to me more than once before. “So where are you living these days?”
He shrugged. “Who lives?”
“Don’t you quote Natalie Wood at me,” I said, mock-punching his muscular shoulder. “I’m the one who showed you Rebel Without a Cause, remember?”
“And where would I be without it?” he said. “James Dean was how I knew I was gay.”
I paused. Best to jump right into it. “You’re not with your aunt anymore?”
He shrugged. “Her son got evicted. He’s crashing with her, so I don’t have a room. She says I’m welcome to sleep on their couch, but the place is pretty crowded.”
Solomon’s father had never been in the picture. His mother had gotten locked up, right around the time she divorced Connor’s father, Solomon’s stepdad. He’d offered to let Solomon stay with them, but Solomon refused. Ran off. Got caught, brought back. Ran off again.
“I did something stupid,” he said, looking at his hands.
“What’s that?”
“There were three guys, and they were picking on this old lady, and I just lost it. One second I was talking to them normally, the next I was just yelling gibberish into the air. And I couldn’t stop. Like I could see myself, from the outside, and I couldn’t control what was happening.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “Where was this?”
“Fairview Plaza.”
“Jesus.” That strip mall was as close as Hudson came to an actual mall. And usually it was full of people. Any one of them could have called the police.
And the police didn’t tend to respond well to emotionally disturbed young men who were six feet tall.
“What did they do?” I asked. “The three guys?”
“They ran. I don’t know if they were scared of me or just didn’t like all the commotion I was causing. By the time I calmed down, they were gone. So was the old lady, for that matter.”
“Did anyone . . . I don’t know, try to help you? Try to talk to you?”
He shook his head, then lowered it into his hands. I reached out to take his hands in my own. “We need to get you some help,” I said.
“No one can help me,” he said. “Not the way I need to be helped.”
“How do you need to be helped?”
Again he shook his head, pulled his hands away from me.
I wanted to tell him about myself. About the meds, how they were helping. How I was trying. How he needed to try.
But whatever was going on with him, it was way worse than what was happening to me. The treatment options for him could be extreme. Plus, Solomon didn’t want to be medicated. He’d said so over and over again.
But I hadn’t either, at first. It was a journey, getting to the place where you could admit how you need help.
“You need to talk to someone, at least,” I said. “Figure out what’s going on, and what kind of treatment options are available. I used to think—”
And then, with a nakedness and need that made me shiver, Solomon interrupted me and said: “I need you to remember.”
“Remember what?” I asked, and waited, but he never answered.
“Help me, Solomon,” I said. “I want to remember. Help me to remember.”
He looked off into the distance.
“It’s getting worse,” I asked. “Isn’t it? I saw—I think I saw something. . . .”
Solomon nodded. “Something is coming. Something that will upset the balance. Change everything.”
I waited for more, but there was none. Eventually, he shut his eyes. Smiled. Whispered something.
He was gone. Back into that dream world of his.
A tiny part of me envied him his ability to escape to a better reality so easily.
The rest of me felt sick.
I remembered the first time I ever saw a homeless person, on a trip to New York City with my family to go to a Broadway show. A woman was sitting on the sidewalk, hugging herself. Her clothes were filthy. Her skin looked awful. And I got so sad and nauseous that I couldn’t enjoy the show, and I was miserable for the next several days.
I kept seeing her in my mind’s eye. I wanted to help her, but what could I do? My mother and father had kept on walking, and so, so had I.
I kept wondering: What had happened? Where had her life gone wrong? Why hadn’t someone taken better care of her? Who had evicted her, kicked her out of her home?
Sitting there next to Solomon, shivering in the chilly air of the abandoned playground, surrounded by fallen jelly beans and shattered bottles, I wondered if I wasn’t watching the exact moment where his life went wrong.
Eight
Solomon
Jellybeans, everywhere. Jellybeans and broken glass, like someone had dropped a hundred jars full of them. Maraud dipped her head, attracted by the sweet smell, but I pulled back on the reins.
It wasn’t a completely unusual sight. Raptor Heights was kinda like that. Crazy characters lived out here. One time I came through and there were thousands of balloons, tied to every lamppost and street sign and fire escape and tree branch. . . . Anything you could tie a balloon to, there were balloons tied to it.
I wondered if that was someone’s othersider ability; the power to summon up inflated balloons. If so, it seemed like a pretty useless ability. If not, a whole lot of people spent a hell of a long time affixing helium balloons for reasons unknown.
We’d been wandering the streets for hours, looking for “Destroy All Monsters” tags. We found plenty. Bright blue smears. And every one made me a little bit sicker. More scared. Monsters meant us. Othersiders. We were what people wanted to destroy.
I’d imagined that they’d be concentrated in the neighborhoods where anti-othersider sentiment was highest, but the opposite was true. They were targeting us. The tags were emblazoned on the walls and doors of known othersiders, and the stables where our dinos were kept. Like a warning; like a threat.
Slowly, I steered us toward the address Niv had given me. I tied up Maraud a block away. No sense drawing attention to the place, especially if Ash really was there.
When I knocked on the front door, I heard a lot of whispered conversation happening on the other side.
“Hey!” Niv said, opening up for me. Beautiful dimples bloomed in his cheeks.
“Hey,” I said as sullenly as I could.
“So happy you came. It’ll do her so much good to see you.”
“I brought pie,” I said, holding up the box I’d bought at Momma’s Bakery. “Apple. Ash’s favorite.”
He ushered me into a big, desolate building. Palace guards eyed me uneasily. They knew me, of course.
“We’re only here for another day or two. We try to move every five days. Just in case, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. The Refugee Princess; the greatest mystery in Darkside. Everyone knew about the assassination attempts; everyone had their own theory about what was behind them. Everyone wanted to know where she really was.
Niv led me into a bright, bare, sunny room. “Were you followed?” asked a grumpy old man. It was Ed. Part of Ash’s security detail since she was born—he had never liked me.
“Nobody knows who the hell I am,” I said.
Ed harrumphed. I wondered how he felt, this wise old soldier, obeying a head of security as young as Niv.
Ash sat in a chair by the window, looking out. The sunlight made her seem fragile, like paper. Her hair was cut boy-short. She wore black leather pants and a coarse workingman’s shirt. I wondered who dressed her. I figured it must have been Niv. Someone who cared for her; someone who remembered who she had been, back before the queen made her mostly catatonic.
I was eight, when she found me. She literally pulled me out of the gutter. Some boys had been pushing me around; she’d watched the whole thing from her royal carriage. Ordered it to s
tay, even when her mother the queen demanded they move on. She saw them calling me names, saw me call them names right back . . . and then she saw the three of them kick me to the ground and stomp me like a bug. Her footmen picked me up and carried my stinking, bloody little self into the carriage.
Her mother was not amused.
This behavior was not unusual; Ash felt from a very young age that it wasn’t right for her to have so much when so many people had so little, and she tried her damnedest to feed every hungry person she saw—but when she found out I had no parents, no one to take care of me, she refused to let her mother’s servants put me out at the end of the day.
Neither the queen nor anyone else could talk Ash out of taking care of me. For four years I lived in the Palace like I was an actual nobleman. For four years we explored the catacombs and turrets and libraries and kitchens and pterodactyl rookeries of the imperial residence. When we got bored with the building, soldiers escorted us to whatever part of Darkside we wished.
“Ash. Hey, can you hear me, Ash?”
No answer. I leaned closer, spoke softer.
“Your city needs you, Princess. Something is up. Something big.”
So. We had a good four years. But when we turned twelve, something terrible took place. I don’t know what. I wasn’t there when it happened, but the story was that her othersider ability had revealed itself in a horrible way. People were hurt; some said people died. The Palace hushed it up. But after that traumatic incident, her mother put the first of many magic spells on her. It prevented future accidents . . . but it also made Ash lose her train of thought, struggle to form sentences, suffer from headaches that kept her in bed all day.
By the time the Palace staff put me out like so much garbage, Ash was in no position to defend me any further.
“I need you, Princess.”
Niv appeared beside me. “In my monthly report to her mother, I asked her to consider lifting some of the wards they put on her.”
I was impressed. That couldn’t have been an easy thing to say to the famously volatile queen. But I wasn’t going to give Niv the satisfaction of a pat on the back. “And?”
“She said it’s a dangerous time. When things calm down, maybe.”
“Things will never calm down,” I said.
“No, but there is something new to be afraid of. There’s a force in this city. Palace intelligence hasn’t come up with much, but they know it’s big, and well-resourced.”
“Any connection to Destroy All Monsters?”
Niv nodded.
“And the ultramarine armbands?”
He shrugged. “I’m lucky to get the little scraps of intelligence that I have, and most of that is just whispers in corridors. All I know is, something is coming. Something that will upset the balance. The fragile peace between othersiders and everybody else. Seeds that were planted long ago are beginning to bloom.”
“What about sending Ash out of the city? She could go into exile, somewhere it wouldn’t matter if her magic was exposed. We could go with her. We could take care of her.”
“According to Queen Carmen, there’s nowhere on Earth that’s safe from her enemies.”
“Do me a favor? Ask around. Somebody in the Palace might have some intel on this ultramarine graffiti, and whatever anti-othersider activity is happening. Cass thinks—” But I didn’t know what Cass thought. Just that she was scared, and she was never scared.
“I will,” he said. “I promise.”
“Do you remember?” I asked. “What happened to her?”
Niv shook his head. “That whole week was so crazy, it’s a total blur.”
“Crazy how?”
He laughed. “You don’t remember? It was right around the same time as the Night of Red Diamonds!”
I looked at Ash. Something about that coincidence felt wrong. My spine shivered.
I took out the pie, cut us each a slice. Niv got plates, forks. Then he said: “Look!”
Ash’s eyes were on my camera. She turned her head and then leaned forward.
“I haven’t seen her respond to something like that in months,” Niv said, rubbing his hands together. I loved him for how much he clearly loved her. It still didn’t mean I trusted him.
Ash reached out to touch the camera, and smiled. Then, very slowly, she took a forkful of pie and ate it.
“That’s amazing!” Niv said, and even old Ed’s face softened, like maybe there was a halfway decent human in there somewhere. “She’s fighting hard. I told you she was a warrior.”
We ate pie together. Ash chewed slowly. And then she looked right at me, like somewhere deep inside her a door had been unlocked, and very definitely smiled.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re okay.”
Her smile faltered. Went away. Came back—but sadder, now, like she knew it wasn’t true, but appreciated the fact that I’d lie to her, to try to make her feel better.
Nine
Ash
I watched them for a while. Five football players in the morning hallway, clearly up to no good. Standing around looking suspicious.
“What are y’all whispering about?” I asked, after sneaking up on them.
No one said a word. Then Sheffield spoke up. “Someone vandalized Marcy Brockelmeyer’s house,” he said, and held up his phone. The screen was cracked. Marcy’s white house was covered in black splatters.
They all looked at him, waiting for what would come next. Here’s the weird thing about Sheffield. He’s popular in a way only jocks are, normally. But he’s not on any sports team. Used to be a football player, but now he’s not. The whole team loves him, though. He’s at every practice. Every game. He’s their ringleader, even from outside the ring.
“That’s awful,” I said, and looked from jock to jock. “And none of you had anything to do with it, I suppose?”
“What a truly terrible accusation,” Sheffield said, and his smile implied we were complicit, him and me—that we were in on a secret. “Clever prank, though, don’t you think? Most vandals use spray-paint, or feces, if they’re especially juvenile. Easy to wash off, or paint over. But this prankster used tar. The only way to fix it is to scrape it all off and paint the whole thing over. Job like that could cost thousands.”
I scanned his face. There was something there, but I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely just impressed with the vandal’s ingenuity. This was doubtless part of Sheffield’s appeal to the other boys: the lack of fear; his utter absence of morality. He could half confess this crime to me—whether or not he actually had anything to do with it—because he knew I couldn’t prove he was involved, so I couldn’t do anything about it.
Solomon’s words echoed in my head. Something is coming. Something that will change everything.
I stepped back. “This is probably connected with what happened to Judy Saperstein’s house, don’t you think?”
“I doubt it,” he said, all innocence. “What makes you say that?”
“You don’t think it’s weird that all this vandalism is happening? All of a sudden?”
Sheffield shrugged, and walked away. He didn’t hurry, just sauntered down the hall. I wanted to punch him right in his button nose.
I could feel it: darkness, bubbling up inside me. Felt the way the ground beneath me did not seem so solid anymore. The sea was there, and the ice I stood on was getting thin again.
I shut my eyes, took ten deep breaths. I was stronger than them, these goons that surrounded me, and I would not let them push me into a full depressive episode.
The bell rang, and I was grateful for it. On my way to homeroom, I passed by Solomon’s room. He wasn’t there, but maybe that didn’t mean anything. After all, I wasn’t in mine either.
At lunch, I went to the guidance counselor’s office.
“Ash!” Mr. Taglia said, gesturing for me to take a seat. He was young, as school employees went. Thirty at the oldest. Thin, bearded, wearing suspenders that I think were ironic.
“It’s about Solomo
n.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re worried about him.” I didn’t like Mr. Taglia, but I trusted him. If that makes any sense.
I nodded. “You said you thought he was schizophrenic.”
“That’s one possibility.”
“But you’re not a psychiatrist. So you’re not qualified to make that diagnosis.”
“No,” he said. “But something is clearly going on. And he needs to be assessed by a professional to determine his condition and figure out the best way to treat it—whatever it is. But the bottom line, Ash, is that he has to want to get help, and right now he doesn’t.”
“I know. I need to help him, but I don’t know how.”
“He trusts you. He doesn’t trust any of us.”
I nodded again. I already knew that.
“I’ve been reading up on it, though,” Mr. Taglia said, “and here’s the thing about severe mental illness. It’s like a physical illness, in that the sooner you catch it, the better your chances of recovery. The sooner someone starts treatment, the better their chances at having a normal life. At not being disabled. If this is indeed schizophrenia, it’s in what’s called the prodromal phase. Damage is being done, and you can’t reverse the damage, but if you act early you can minimize it. If not . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
“What . . . causes it? Triggers it?”
“It’s hard to say,” he said. “But we do know that the greatest risk factor for developing schizophrenia is having a relative who has it, so there’s obviously a genetic component.”
I didn’t want this answer, but I needed it. “What about if . . . something happens. Something really bad. Can that . . . ?”
“Well, yes. Trauma is often a trigger.”
I thought of Solomon’s words: I need you to remember.
Something had happened. To both of us. How much of it did he remember? And why couldn’t I? And did it have anything to do with my own depression, the feeling like a hole had opened up in my chest that would suck me into myself forever? If we could get at the truth of it, together, it might save us both.
Destroy All Monsters Page 4